Disclaimer: J.K Rowling owns everything. I, in turn, own nothing.
Acknowledgements: Thank you to my editor, Athena Hope, as well as my betas: 3CP, DarknessEnthroned|MJ Bradley, Luq707, Regress, Thanos, and Thobeobo for their contributions.
ANYONE WHO JOINS MY DISCORD SERVER CAN READ SIX CHAPTERS AHEAD OF WHAT IS POSTED HERE! Chapters also release two days early in audiobook format over on YouTube.
If you want even earlier access, then sign up to my P.A.T.R.E.O.N page. They are usually a dozen or more chapters ahead of Discord.
All those links are on my profile, and if any give you trouble, use the direct links on my website's homepage.
Chapter 27: The Blade Itself
The only sound was his own breathing, the lone light coming from underneath doors set into the flanking walls. Through those cracks filtered stale air thick with the musty scent of weathered parchment.
Or so it had.
A wayward wind sighed through the abandoned corridor and stirred the stagnant air. It snatched at the tassels of a silver cloak that had been lost to him and teased a soft whisper out of the glass-smooth fabric. The hairs on his neck prickled. Where had the breeze come from?
A narrow stairwell materialized out of the darkness the way an eavesdropper might step smoothly from a pool of shadow. The stone steps wound down into a black pit like the entrance to a crypt.
Harry knew no crypt waited on the floor below. The truth was more unnerving than any fanciful lie his mind could conjure up.
The Department of Mysteries.
He wiped sweat from his hands using the front of his cloak, but froze halfway through the motion. The cloak… There was no need to breach the wards or risk facing the Unspeakables.
His descent down the steep steps was silent. There was no click, no patter, not even the faintest echo of a sound. Or perhaps there was and he failed to hear it over the hurried drumming of his heartbeat.
Goosebumps poked up along his arms as he stepped into the corridor whose stone walls and black door had haunted his dreams for almost an entire year, and then plagued his nightmares ever since. He steeled his nerve and set his shoulders. What had happened in the past could not be undone. All that mattered was the future, and returning home to see it bettered hinged on him getting through that door.
Harry reached for the brass handle, but high, cold laughter exploded in his head and resounded through him like the vibrations of a giant bell. Its harsh sound burrowed into his bones and bit a hole straight through his soul. His knees slammed against the stone floor and he bowed his head with his eyes closed so tightly he was seeing stars.
Stars? There were no stars, nor any trace of that awful laughter. There was only darkness and the gentle sound of snoring. Just a dream. And one he should have recognized, at that. Just another fucking dream…
Harry climbed from bed and reached for clean robes. There would be no sleeping now. Not while his mind pondered possible ways of entering the Department of Mysteries and seeking out their research into time.
A shadow tousling its hair brought him up short when he stepped out from behind his curtains. "Can't sleep either?" his father asked. Harry just shook his head. It was the first time James had spoken to him since the solstice. "Come on, then. Let's go out and fly."
It was a dreary morning. Puddles unseen in the predawn darkness splashed up and left their trousers dripping as they traipsed down the muddy path leading to the shed where Sirius's broom was stored. Proper rain had begun drumming down by the time they mounted up and took off.
Harry's hands slid along the handle as he forced the broom into tight corkscrews and sharp dives through bare branches near the Forbidden Forest's edge. Soon he had lost feeling in his fingers, and not long later they decided it was best to land. Both boys peeled sopping hair off their foreheads as they came in for a landing. They were soaked through to the bone.
None of that mattered. At least not to Harry. The joy of flight had stripped him of the dream and his worries about where their friendship lied. Even his contemplations surrounding the Department of Mysteries and a way back home faded into the background.
His feet stuck in a pool of mud and almost pitched him forward when he touched down. "You've gotten sloppy," James said with a breathy laugh. "No one half as good as you should almost make an arse of themselves like that."
Harry tossed his head and hefted the broom over his shoulder. "Almost is the important word there."
James shuddered. "Is it not enough for you to look like me? Do you have to talk and move like me too?"
"Sorry, I had to watch you closely before the solstice. It had to be convincing." The words wavered near the end as he realized what he'd said. "Sorry," he muttered. "I shouldn't have said anything."
James released a long exhale as his shoulders slumped. "It's all right. Merlin knows I should be the one apologizing after being such a git all week."
"What do you mean?" Harry asked.
James blinked at him through the morning mist and steady rain. "Sorry? Are we talking about the same thing?"
"Are you not mad? You know, about the solstice?"
"I'm livid." The words lashed out like a tightly coiled whip. "I was fucking useless again. Dad was fighting for his life and all I could do was lay there and get tortured like some damsel."
"I thought…" Harry paused, hoping James would not make him say it. "I was supposed to keep you and your father safe. I was—"
"Merlin's sagging tits!" James swore. "You actually think the whole thing's your fault, don't you?"
"I was supposed to keep you safe, I was—"
"How thick are you? It's not like you could have stopped Dad or I from fighting, or guessed what the fucker behind that silver mask was planning. Even Dad was caught off guard." There was a short pause as his father looked away from him. "Besides, you did save us. That mad twat was going to torture me until Dad told him what he wanted. He would probably have killed us after that."
"All that still happened because I got overconfident and assumed what was going on," Harry insisted. "We could have taken him had I stayed back."
James shook his head. "Does it ever get easier?"
"What?" The shift in tone took Harry aback. "Does what ever get easier?"
"I don't know," James growled. "Here I am, all stitched up that I was useless and wishing I had been you, and then you come out and say you didn't do enough."
"Wait. You—"
"I was jealous, okay? It's just… it's hard, Harry. It's really hard being unconscious while a mate swoops in and saves the day." James scowled at the sky as if it was responsible for all of this. "Forget it. I don't know why I asked in the first place. It's not like you could understand what it feels like."
"No." Harry understood as intimately as a spurned lover watching close friends follow in his footsteps. "It never gets easier. Not if you're a decent sort."
"Not even a little bit?" James asked. "I get that everyone makes mistakes, but people like you and Dad don't make mistakes like me. Making fewer of them must help some."
Not since new recruits had wept over fallen friends had he last heard anyone sound so desperate. "It helps some, but not the way you think." The coward in him wanted to tell James everything would get better, but doing so would be a grave unkindness. "Getting smarter, getting stronger, getting more experienced — all of that helps keep people safe, but you'll always make mistakes."
"Teach me!" James's eyes were wide and pleading. "Teach me how to fight. Teach me how to—"
"No."
"We were all in the DA together." Neville's voice had been a hard whisper, like the rustling of robes when two men go for their wands. "It was all supposed to be about fighting You-Know-Who, wasn't it? And this is the first chance we've had to do something real." Everyone who had gathered in that forest had been taught to fight, and all of them were dead.
"You should have expected this back when you agreed to train them," Bill had said after three boys from the DA were killed. "You can't give men the tools to fight and expect those tools to be stowed away."
"Never give a man weapons you don't want him to use," Kingsley had said after a new recruit's attempt at Fiendfyre had cost them all the day. "The kind of men who can be trusted with that sort of power don't just turn up with bright eyes expecting to be the hero."
"Please!" Tears glistened in James's eyes as he clutched at Harry's robes. "I can't just rely on you and Dad. What if you're not there? What if they come for me? What then, Harry? What then?"
James's words teased up an awful memory of his first day sitting in a pink-clad classroom and glaring up at the toad-faced woman who called herself their teacher.
"So we're not supposed to be prepared for what's waiting out there?"
Harry's resolve cracked. How could he deny James when that question had come from his own lips? Would his father not be safer knowing how to defend himself?
No. That was like saying muggle children would be safer if they all kept machine guns in their school bags. James had rushed back into the fray with all the eager ignorance of youth. Just like Colin Creevey had. Just like Ginny had.
But then there were those like Tonks's parents, like Mrs. Weasley, like Hagrid. Would all of them have still died had they been more seasoned fighters?
Harry set his jaw. "I'll teach you, but only when I'm convinced you won't take that teaching and go get yourself killed with it."
James's face contorted into an ugly picture of astonished outrage. "What—"
"I'm not going to teach you, just so you can run off against impossible odds and die." Harry had to be responsible — it was his duty both as James's friend, and as a person with power.
Yet telling himself so was not easy. What he wanted was to shelter James from the merest possibility of stepping into harm's way. Minimizing it was the right thing to do for now, but if his father learned caution and circumstances bent in certain ways, then that might change. So he would keep his word, no matter how much the idea terrified him.
His heart beat hard against his ribs, and he wondered if his answer to James about whether things got easier had been an inadvertent lie.
"I make mistakes like the next man. In fact, being — forgive me — rather cleverer than most men, my mistakes tend to be correspondingly huger."
Dumbledore had put his finger on the pulse of it. Minimizing errors could reduce the frequency of regret and grief, but the fewer one made, the more damming their mistakes tended to be, and the weight of knowing that was often crippling.
"Fine." James's words came out choked. "Fine!" He swung his leg back over his broomstick and kicked off, showering Harry with a spray of mud and soaring back off toward the castle.
There was a foreboding air about the Great Hall when he re-entered the castle more than an hour later. Many students were sitting stone still and staring down at copies of that morning's Daily Prophet. More looked pale and shaken, and very few were locked in conversation. Those who were had their heads together and communicated in grim whispers.
Harry resisted the urge to glare at Riddle as he took a seat and reached for the nearest newspaper. What had the bastard—
The paper almost slipped out of his nerveless fingers. The diagram he had recovered from the muggle weapons compound was printed, line for line, on the front page. Above it was a damning headline.
MUGGLE PLOT UNCOVERED — THE WIZARDING COMMUNITY IS IN GRAVE DANGER!
Things were worse than he had guessed. Riddle was not merely chasing power the way he had in Harry's world. Between savaging a muggle science facility on Samhain, the raid on that weapons compound, and now leaking these schematics to the Daily Prophet, it was clear Riddle meant to set the populace against itself and watch them tear the world apart.
More confusing was how that morning's paper had ever seen the light of day. Why had it not been censored? Everyone knew the empire controlled the flow of information. They had an entire department of the British ministry dedicated to it, for Merlin's…
It was like the temperature dropped by ten degrees as the pieces came together. Fuck… Harry had hand-delivered sealed documents to whoever headed the Department of Censure and Circenses just last night. Forged documents, he realized far too late. Forged documents permitting the publication of that morning's news, unless he missed his guess.
Harry was grateful it was Saturday and that there were no classes. Focusing would have been impossible with the sickening amount of guilt writhing in his stomach and with his plethora of worries. No matter how many times he told himself last night must have garnered him great favour, it was not enough. Riddle would surely trust him enough to aid in larger missions soon and that would present him opportunities, but if the world descended into civil war, then it would hardly matter.
The first stars were visible against a twilight sky when he exited the castle that evening. Once off the grounds and halfway down the path to Hogsmeade, he ensured no one was nearby, then transfigured his features and disapparated. His next breath drew in the smell of salt. It was a fresh and pleasant scent he briefly savoured before opening his eyes. The sun had sunk behind the distant cliffs and left their shadows to stand sentry over a charcoal sea.
He turned his back on the churning water and strode across the abandoned street. It was always quiet here. La Piscine à Reflets stood alone along the coastal highway and he had never seen a single car drive by. The only sounds were the lapping sea and the ceaseless wind, then the tinkling of bells as he pushed open the glass door and stepped into Narcissa's lobby.
"Mister Renn."
The sight of her waiting startled him, but he recovered fast. "Miss Black."
The lofty cast so often in her eyes was gone. A glimmer had replaced it. Before he could consider further she was stepping back and gesturing toward the open door into her office. "I think it would be best if you followed me." Her stare remained on him as they took seats across from one another. "I understand now why you insisted on the contracts."
"I had a feeling you might get there in the end," Harry said with a smug half-smile.
"You knew exactly what you had." She said it as if reciting a statistic. "You didn't ask for me to inspect it hoping I would verify its authenticity."
"Is that what you thought I was doing?" Harry could not help but ask.
"It's not every day an unknown wizard walks in bearing the genuine sword of Godric Gryffindor." Narcissa looked into his face again. Her stare was shameless and intense. "A sword that belonged to my brother-in-law until recently."
Harry remembered that morning's article and felt the Elder Wand shift slightly in its holster. "You understand, Miss Black, that I won't be returning it?"
"I'm not a fool, Mister Renn," she responded with a short sniff.
"Then I take it there's no need to worry about you trying to return it to him?"
A shadow fell across her face, darker than the sea at midnight and more fleeting than the softest kiss. "I understand where my talents lie. They would be unhelpful in opposing someone who has stolen this."
"Good." Harry adjusted his expectations for this meeting. He had anticipated at least an outburst on Riddle's behalf. "What have you discovered?"
"It absorbs only that which makes it stronger," Narcissa answered. "Anything that doesn't will make no mark on it."
Hermione's explanation about the sword's enchantments only covered half of what he had just been told. "When you say anything that doesn't make it stronger won't leave a mark, are you talking metaphorically?" Somehow he did not think so. "What would happen if I blocked a powerful dark curse with it, just as an example?"
"An interesting question." Narcissa tapped the heel of her shoe against the hardwood floor. "Goblins enchant their metals to repel anything that won't strengthen them."
"So the spells would deflect?" When he'd heard about the enchantment for the first time, he had not considered its potential implications.
"That would be my guess if you blocked using mundane metal, but this sword is made from silver."
"I don't see what that has to do with anything," Harry said after some consideration.
Narcissa stopped tapping her foot against the floor. "Silver is an alchemical metal, Mister Renn. It's both highly reactive and magically corrosive."
"Magically corrosive?" Belby had gone over the reactiveness of silver, but had not mentioned this. "What does that mean, exactly?"
Narcissa folded her hands on the desk and relaxed into her chair. The posture looked both comfortable and practiced, and he guessed it was one she adopted often. It suited her. "Have you ever heard the tales of werewolves being afraid of silver?" There was an eager note in her speech that he had never heard before. "That rumour started because, once upon a time a werewolf died after being wounded by a silver weapon." Narcissa's lips curved up. "I see you understand the significance."
He had always assumed those stories were just old wives' tales.
"Werewolves are resistant to almost anything short of Fiendfyre or the unforgivables."
"They can thank their composition," Narcissa explained. "The difference between magical and non-magical creatures is that magic comprises some portion of the former. It's a part of them, unlike any other beings. Not even we're made up of magic."
"What does that mean?" Harry asked. "I understand what the implications would look like if they could cast magic, but since they can't, I'm a little lost."
"It's different depending on what kind of creature we're discussing, but most enjoy some level of enhanced resilience." Harry found it hard to look away from her. Eagerness had been the wrong word. What he saw was passion, and it transformed her. "Werewolves are some of the most magical creatures in the world, so their resistance is stronger."
"And the silver gets around that, somehow?" He asked it as much to continue the current conversation as because he was curious. The Narcissa he had known was aloof and treated everything as though it was beneath her. Seeing a younger version of her so entwined in her own interests was compelling in a way he had not expected.
"Magic breaks down when exposed to silver," she explained. "That's why werewolves falter against silver weapons and why the muggles tried using silver shields during the Conquest."
That last part got his attention. "How well did they work?"
"It varied, but generally not all that well. Any time silver and magic came into contact, the results were different. They depended on how much silver versus how much magic and a host of other variables."
They had drifted, almost unbeknownst to him. "So the sword…"
"Right, the sword…" The enraptured shroud Narcissa had been wearing crumbled. Harry felt its absence and wished it would return. "I think the sword would stop most curses," Narcissa said after a thoughtful pause. "Those goblin enchantments haven't been tested against something as potent as an unforgivable, as far as I'm aware, but they would hold against most other spells."
The goblin's work was not the part he doubted. Not after seeing it hold up against basilisk venom. "But the silver…"
"Would make things unpredictable. Spells might deflect in unforeseen directions, or they might fizzle out instead of redirecting. It's difficult to say what they would do, but I'm confident they would never touch you."
Reliably deflecting spells with the sword while casting with a wand would be nigh impossible, but that was irrelevant. He had come in hopes of testing Narcissa and gauging how much trust he should place in her capabilities.
The important thing was that she had passed with flying colours.
"Thank you." Saying it aloud was odd. He had never expected to be thanking Draco's mother.
Narcissa smiled. Seeing it directed at him was even stranger. It must really have surprised him because his stomach fluttered. "It's been a pleasure, Mister Renn. It's rare that I get projects as interesting as this one."
Harry smiled back at her. "I have another for you, if I can afford it."
"You have the other three, don't you?" It was a quiet question lacking heat or malice. "You stole all four from him."
The smile slipped off Harry's face. "I won't be answering that until you sign another nondisclosure." Narcissa's own expression smoothed until it could have put the weathered faces of those distant cliffs across the sea to shame.
"And the price?" The aftertaste of his most recent statement carved these words into a rough shape. There had been nothing else to say, but seeing the shift in Narcissa made him wish there had been.
But then she smiled again, just like her last, and he regretted nothing. Harry shook himself. It had been too long since he'd last spent time in the presence of women his own age if Narcissa Black was doing this to him. "Sorry," he said. "I was distracted for a second. The price?"
"Go ahead with the commission." There was no sign of the harsh judgement he had expected after his mind had drifted. "The two of us can discuss the price and make sure it's one you can afford."
"Miss Black," he said slowly, "I can't pay you with the artifacts, and I don't—"
She pressed a finger to her lips and he fell silent. "I'll make sure the price is one you can afford. You have my word." Harry's heart skipped a beat when he accepted her offered hand and felt a faint stirring in his nether regions. Her skin was as smooth and soft as moon-soaked seastone, but it was only skin. The sea salt must have muddled his brain if it was reacting this way.
Harry deposited the Sword of Gryffindor in his makeshift vault and waited there until his body's stirring ran its course. It did not take long, standing so near the founders' trinkets. They made him think of Riddle, and the accompanying anger was far stronger than the random bout of lust.
Which set up the second part of that night's plan perfectly.
Hangleton Estate, as he had learned was the name of Riddle's manor, loomed high above any building within miles.
But that would not be the case much longer.
Voldemort could have benefited from one of the lessons Kingsley had imparted during their years at war.
"Never give a man weapons you don't want him to use,"
The Dark Lord had taught him hatred, and he would make him rue the day. If this did not drive Riddle into hasty bouts of foolishness, then nothing would.
"SGRIOSFÀILE!"
His hatred howled out of him and through the Elder Wand, then found an outlet in the air. Trees were torn out of the ground and tossed skyward like motes of dust kicked up by a strong breeze, and hedges crumbled like sand at high tide as currents of air that were denser than a mountain and sharper than a surgeon's blade gushed toward the manor.
Harry was about to reholster the wand when a jet of green light missed him by mere inches.
Fuck. "Ventus Divinum!" The burst of wind launched him into the air and almost tore the breath out of his lungs as his vision briefly darkened, then returned.
"MORSMORDRE!"
The great, green skull billowed past him and unfurled across the star-strewn sky. Fuck. The Dark Mark's integrated wards were formidable. Harry could break through them, but not quickly and certainly not while in the midst of combat.
Which meant he was trapped.
The conjured wind he used to slow his fall was the only thing that saved him. It threw off the caster's timing, and so the killing curse sailed wide, but a purple spell gouged into Harry's shoulder and sent him stumbling. His foot snagged the underbrush and dragged him into the dirt.
A burst of light flashed overhead, and then he was back on his feet. The world was swaying back and forth. The good news was that he felt no pain. The bad news was that a hot tingling had already crept halfway down his arm, which was likely worse. The curse must have cut deep.
Thankfully it was his left arm, so he had no trouble batting away three spells and conjuring a silver shield whose wavering light cast the dark stain spreading down his arm in sharp relief. Dread settled alongside the nausea in his stomach. It was heavy bleeding.
Two killing curses, just inches apart, slammed into the earth he tore up just in time. There were multiple attackers — no one, sans Voldemort himself, could cast successive killing curses that fast.
Fuck!
Riddle had correctly guessed he would return after burning down the Gaunt Shack, which meant whoever he had left to guard his manor must have been among his best.
Harry reinforced his shield and braced for his next move. This was not a fight he could win if it continued, not while injured and without knowing who exactly sought his life. His only choice was to escape.
"SPREADHADH TALAMH!"
A hundred dragons made from stone burst out of the earth in a spray of rock and clay, launching into the air with roars like cracking thunder. Behind them came a thousand smaller beasts, and more were forming out of the debris.
Harry crumpled into the circle of grass he had left around himself as Dumbledore's words came back to him.
"The relationships between elements are not harmonious. You will find two of them easier to utilize when casting magic. In most cases this means only that calling on the elements you are less attuned to will lead to greater strain, but for grander things they will be entirely beyond your reach. Such is the way of things."
Casting Spreadhadh Talamh should have been impossible. The sister spell of Fiendfyre but in the form of earth, it was the nemesis of air — the element he was most attuned to.
Except Harry had the Elder Wand, which played by its own rules.
Not that it circumvented every limitation — the drain of casting Spreadhadh Talamh was unbelievable.
Harry was certain for a moment he would faint, but then two screams made themselves heard amidst the chaos and he knew his opening had come. "VENTUS DIVINUM!"
That blast of wind was short, but strong enough to send him sailing over the treetops. It was as if time slowed down as he hung there, suspended in the Dark Mark's ghostly glow. It was all he could see. The sights around him were growing dim, and darkness was creeping in from both sides.
Whether from his wound or extreme fatigue, unconsciousness was coming for him.
It would claim him too late. Harry estimated he would pass the Dark Mark's outer ward line and regain the ability to apparate before he fell unconscious.
But then he realized the hole in his plan, the imperfection that his addled mind had missed.
If he apparated to Hogwarts, the blood loss would kill him long before he reached the hospital wing, yet he could not think of where else to go.
Charcoal seas and shadowed cliffs flashed through his thoughts as the air was squeezed out of his lungs, taking his awareness with it.
"The blade itself incites to deeds of violence."
— Homer
A special thank you to my high-tier patron, Cup, for her generous and unwavering support.
PS: The next chapter will be out in one week. Remember that chapters can be read early on Discord, YouTube, and P.A.T.R.E.O.N! All those links are on my profile, and if any give you trouble, use my website's homepage. That site can be found via a generic Google search of my pen name.